The NITRD 30th Anniversary Symposium was held in Washington D.C. at the National Spy Museum. The event provided an opportunity for the computing research community to come together and celebrate the impact that federal funding has had on computing technologies, innovations and the world at large. The day featured insightful remarks from key leaders in the community including Alondra Nelson (Deputy Assistant to the President Deputy Director for Science and Society White House Office of Science and Technology Policy), Barbara McQuiston (Director of Defense Research and Engineering for Research and Technology in the Department of Defense), Kamie Roberts (Director of the National Coordination Office for the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program), Sethuraman (“Panch”) Panchanathan (Director of the National Science Foundation), Erwin Gianchandani  (NSF) and the Computing Community Consortium’s Chair Elizabeth Bradley.

The event consisted of five panels, each composed of four to five experts discussing the impact federal funding has had on their field and what entities funding should focus on going forward.

Computing at Scale

Moderated by Ben Zorn (Microsoft and CCC)

• Luiz André Barroso (Google)
• Ian Foster (Argonne National Laboratory and CCC)
• Timothy Pinkston (University of Southern California)
• Kathy Yelick (University of California, Berkeley)

Networking and Security

Moderated by Bob Bonneau (The Office of the Secretary of Defense/Department of Defense)

• Deborah Frincke (Sandia National Laboratories)
• Jim Kurose (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
• Chris Ramming (VMware)

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning 

Moderated by Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder)

• Charles Isbell (Georgia Institute of Technology)
• Chad Jenkins (University of Michigan and CCC)
• Talitha Washington (Clark Atlanta University)
• Patti Ordóñez Franco (University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras)

Privacy and Internet of Things 

Moderated by Charles (“Chuck”) Romine (National Institute of Standards and Technology)

• Ed Felten (Princeton University)
• Marc Groman (Groman Consulting)
• Katerina Megas (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
• Sunoo Park (Cornell University and CIFellow)

How Technology Can Benefit Society: Broadening Perspectives in Fundamental Research

Moderated by Alondra Nelson (Office of Science and Technology Policy)

• Janet Abbate (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
• Deborah Estrin (Cornell Tech)
• Charles Isbell (Georgia Institute of Technology)
• Ramayya Krishnan (Carnegie Mellon University)

The symposium also incorporated voices from early career researchers during a poster session. Fifty Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) presented a poster on their postdoc research and had the opportunity to speak with the other NITRD attendees about their work. You can check out their posters here.

The event was a great way to honor the last 30 years of continued investments in Networking and Information Technology facilitated by the NITRD program. If you did not get the chance to tune into the livestream,  you can view the panel recordings on the CCC web page or on NITRD’s YouTube channel. We will be posting a blog series highlighting each panel over the coming weeks.